On 20 October 1827 a combined British, French and Russian fleet sailed into Navarino Bay, on the south-west coast of the Peloponnese, and anchored among an Ottoman and Egyptian fleet that outnumbered it. The allies had come to enforce an armistice in the Greek War of Independence, not to fight. Then a British boat was fired on beside a Turkish fireship, and within four hours most of the Ottoman and Egyptian ships had been sunk, burned or wrecked, without the loss of a single allied ship. The Hellenic Navy and the historian Andrew Lambert both describe Navarino as the last naval battle fought under sail. London called it an "untoward event" and recalled the admiral, but the battle made Greek independence all but certain.
A war the powers wanted stopped
The Greek revolt against the Ottoman Empire began in 1821. Sultan Mahmud II asked Mehmet Ali, the pasha of Egypt, for help, and Mehmet Ali's son Ibrahim Pasha brought an Egyptian army and fleet that turned the war in the sultan's favor. By 1827 Ibrahim's troops were fighting in the Peloponnese, and the Ottoman and Egyptian fleets lay at anchor together in Navarino Bay.1
In the Treaty of London of July 1827, Britain, France and Russia agreed to press both sides into an armistice and sent their fleets to enforce it. The Greeks accepted; the Ottomans did not. The British commander in the Mediterranean, Vice-Admiral Sir Edward Codrington, was a veteran of Trafalgar, where he had commanded the Orion. His instructions from the ambassador in Constantinople, Stratford Canning, were to keep the peace with the speaking-trumpet if possible and, if it came to that, by cannon-shot. The French squadron was led by Rear-Admiral Henri de Rigny and the Russian squadron by Rear-Admiral Login Heiden.2
According to a biography of Codrington on A Web of English History, he and de Rigny met Ibrahim at Navarino on 25 September and came away with his verbal agreement to the armistice. Within days a squadron from Navarino sailed north toward Patras and the Gulf of Corinth, and Codrington met it and turned it back. On 14 October the allied squadrons arrived off Navarino.3
Into the bay, 20 October
Codrington decided to go into the bay and anchor his ships close alongside the Ottoman and Egyptian fleet. On paper he was badly outgunned. The allies had 11 ships of the line and 9 frigates, with about 1,300 guns. Ibrahim's force had only three ships of the line but around twenty frigates and dozens of smaller warships, more than 2,000 guns in all, drawn up in a horseshoe around the bay and covered by shore batteries.4
According to Royal Museums Greenwich, the wind kept the allies out until 20 October. When a Turkish boat came out to tell him to leave, Codrington is reported to have answered that he had come to give orders, not to receive them. He led the column in with his flagship, HMS Asia, and the leading British ships passed the shore batteries and anchored without a shot being fired. In his dispatch Codrington wrote that he had ordered that no gun should be fired unless guns were first fired by the Turks.5
The date is in the Gregorian calendar. In the Julian calendar, which Russia and the Greeks then used, it was 8 October.6
A boat, a fireship and a volley
The frigate HMS Dartmouth found she had anchored close to a Turkish fireship and sent a boat to have it moved. The Turks answered with musketry. Lieutenant G. W. H. Fitzroy and several of the boat's crew were shot. The Dartmouth's casualty list in the official returns names Fitzroy, a midshipman, three seamen and a marine among her dead. The Dartmouth and the French flagship replied with musket fire, the guns joined in, and by about half past two the battle was general across the bay.7
What followed was one-sided. Fought at anchor and at close range, the battle lasted about four hours. Lambert writes that roughly three-quarters of the Ottoman and Egyptian fleet was sunk or burned. According to the Encyclopedia of Russian History it lost all three of its ships of the line and twenty-two frigates. Not one allied ship was lost.8
Faces in the smoke
Codrington's own son was in the thick of it. Henry Codrington, then 19, was signal midshipman in his father's flagship, the Asia, and was severely wounded. He survived and went on to become an admiral of the fleet.9
In the Russian line the Azov, commanded by Captain Mikhail Lazarev, fought so hard that she became the first ship of the Russian navy to be awarded the stern flag of St George. Among her officers were Lieutenant Pavel Nakhimov, in charge of one of her batteries, with Midshipman Vladimir Kornilov and the cadet Vladimir Istomin. All three became famous Russian naval commanders.10
The allied squadron also carried a painter. According to Royal Museums Greenwich, George Philip Reinagle sailed with Codrington's squadron and saw the battle himself. His painting of it hangs in the museum's collection, as does Thomas Luny's 1828 version shown above.11
The losses
Estimates differ. Lambert gives allied losses of 174 killed and 475 wounded, nearly half of them British. The British ambassador's 2016 commemoration speech breaks the 174 dead down as 75 British, 40 French and 59 Russian, and the Encyclopedia of Russian History gives the Russian share as 59 dead and 139 wounded. WarHistory.org gives 181 killed and 487 wounded, and the Hellenic Navy puts allied losses at between 200 and 654 men.12
Ottoman and Egyptian losses are much less certain. Lambert says they lost at least 4,000 men, the Hellenic Navy about 6,000, and the Encyclopedia of Russian History about 7,000 sailors.13
An "untoward event" that freed Greece
The victory embarrassed the government in London. In the King's speech to Parliament in January 1828 the battle was called an "untoward event", and Codrington, who was felt to have gone beyond his instructions, was recalled in June 1828. Russia, by contrast, promoted Lazarev, according to the Encyclopedia of Russian History.14
Navarino still removed the Ottoman and Egyptian fleet from the Greek war. Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire in April 1828. According to the Foundation of the Hellenic World, in June the three powers agreed to send French troops to the Peloponnese to oversee Ibrahim's withdrawal, and Lambert writes that Egypt left the conflict that August. In September 1829 the Ottoman Empire accepted the powers' decisions on Greece. In February 1830 Britain, France and Russia signed a protocol in London that recognized Greece as an independent state, and the settlement was completed in 1832.15
Also on 20 October
In 1805 the Austrian general Karl Mack, trapped in Ulm by Napoleon's sweep around his army, surrendered about 27,000 men. Six weeks later Napoleon won at Austerlitz.16
In 1944 the US Sixth Army made the main landings on Leyte that began the American return to the Philippines. General Douglas MacArthur waded ashore with President Sergio Osmeña and broadcast by radio: "People of the Philippines, I have returned!". The naval battle that followed is told on our 23 October page.17
